This week I’ve had the pleasure of adding a number of scrapbooks to our Amherst College Scrapbooks Collection. As I assessed the scrapbooks I was adding, I noticed that a number of them had been created by pasting material into existing books. This was a common practice for centuries and I always enjoy running across new examples.
My interest is two-fold: the underlying books are, by their nature, something that the owner no longer wanted and would otherwise have discarded. We don’t tend to have many examples of some of these more ephemeral volumes, for instance: sales catalogs, subscription books, and penmanship notebooks. Also interesting is what types of materials the creator of the scrapbook chose to put in a volume with a visually cluttered background. In the 19th century, when the bulk of our scrapbook collection was created, blank books would have been relatively accessible to college students. Indeed the majority of our scrapbooks were created in volumes sold for that explicit purpose. Often the scrapbooks created in books were more informal, a way for the maker to keep track of interesting news clippings or humorous anecdotes rather than a showpiece of memorabilia from their college years.
This scrapbook (pictured here and at the top of this post) was created by Charles Lord, Amherst class of 1838, in an old penmanship notebook.
Edward Lacey, class of 1890, created this scrapbook in the “Value of Railroad Securities, Earnings and Charges, Prices of Stocks and Bonds”. Under memorabilia from Mount Holyoke and clipping on college sports, the tables of values are still visible.
This scrapbooks was created in a volume containing the first nineteen annual reports of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company. The compiler of this book tried hard to completely obscure the original text by pasting newspaper clippings tightly spaced over the whole page. He didn’t finish the job however; the later pages of the book reveal the underlying text where articles are tucked between the pages but not yet pasted in. This compiler is unknown, although assumed to be a member of the class of 1876 based on the content of the book.
When George Waite White, class of 1861, was looking for a book to use for his college memorabilia, a copy of a bound subscription book for Lossing’s Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, first published in 1850, came to hand. Purchasing books by subscription wasn’t unusual at this time (somewhat like a kickstarter or Amazon pre-order) and this subscription book allowed potential subscribers to see what the cloth binding would look like and read a summary of the work and many, many testimonials. Other subscription books might have had selections from the text and sample illustrations. George only filled a few pages, so we can see the subscription list, with only two names on it, unobscured.
Henry Holmes, class of 1860, created this scrapbook of humorous newspaper clippings in an 1847 edition of Emerson’s North American Arithmetic. He made no attempt at obscuring the original text, which makes for a visually confusing reading experience.
I saved my favorite scrapbook for last. James Plimpton, class of 1878, created this one in a 220 page, illustrated brass goods catalog from 1871. Except for the illustrations of brass products in the background, this is a classic undergraduate scrapbook full of programs, tickets, dance cards and other memorabilia. I love nineteenth century catalogs and this is an excellent one – I particularly enjoy the odd conjunction of materials: baseball programs with faucets, concert tickets with steam whistles.
I’ll close with gratitude for James Plimpton and every one of the nearly 200 alums whose scrapbooks have made their way to Archives & Special Collections over the years for the fascinating glimpses they give us into their lives and interests!